The story of Britain over the past decade has been a tale of three Kates, says Jenny
McCartney - Moss, Price and Middleton.

When Kate Middleton rode in the car to her royal wedding Westminster Abbey, a slender bride sheathed in white lace whose hands fluttered hello to the crowds like those of an excited child, she must have known what she was travelling towards: marriage to the man she loved, certainly, but also a life as one of the most scrutinised women in the world, the female face of Britain at home and abroad.

The decades to come will belong to Kate, as once they did to Diana: every aspect of her bearing and behaviour will be discussed in a way that will sometimes feel oppressive. But self-assurance is an armour, and Kate appears to have plenty. Diana, much younger and more emotionally fragile, was pitched into a marriage full of misunderstandings and an uncomfortably chilly world of protocol. Much of the increasingly obsessive attention that clung to her was attendant on her evident unhappiness, the public’s prurient yearning to watch her first fall apart, and then put herself back together again as a single woman cut loose from the Royal family.

After Diana’s death, however, an odd thing happened. It seemed the British people had developed a taste for well-known women in the perpetual throes of drama, whose lives could be fodder for a long-running soap opera jammed with plot twists. In the last decade, this role has been filled by two women also called Kate: Kate Moss and Katie Price. Their bodies, their boyfriends and break-ups have rarely been out of the newspapers, and both – for better, and often worse – have encapsulated some of what it means to be a young British woman today.

Moss, a waif-like girl from Croydon famous since the early 1990s as Britain’s most successful model, became notorious in 2005 when pictures of her allegedly snorting cocaine were published. The fashion world rallied to support her, and her earnings and prestige increased: in 2006, she was named Model of the Year, and in 2007 her first designer collection for Topshop was mobbed by eager young fans. More recently, there was a furore over Moss’s declared diet mantra: “Nothing tastes as good as skinny feels”, which it was felt might encourage anorexia in young girls. Today, coverage of her tends to teeter between fawning over her glamorous, airbrushed image on magazine covers and carping about how she’s ageing in paparazzi snapshots.

Katie Price, Britain’s other pin-up and tear-down girl, started out as a “glamour model” called Jordan, whose surgically enhanced breasts sporadically inflated to ever more surprising proportions. She already had an autistic child, Harvey, by the footballer Dwight Yorke when she softened her image by marrying the pop singer Peter Andre and bearing him two children. They later had an acrimonious divorce, whereupon she got hitched to a former cage-fighter, and pretty soon divorced him as well. Television cameras have followed her every move, documenting her domestic rows and professional engagements, and she has created a lucrative line of autobiographies and pony books for bedazzled little girls. At the age of 32, her face and lips are already radically altered by rhinoplasty, Botox and fillers. She is currently stepping out with an Argentinian male model.

I am not sneering at either Moss or Price per se: both are multi-millionairesses who have shown the graft and drive to exploit the opportunities offered them to the maximum. But they both reflect and influence the values of a generation of young girls who increasingly believe that they are wholly defined by how they look, that hedonism and perpetual drama automatically make a life worth living, and that the chief quality by which any woman should be judged is whether or not she is overtly sexually attractive.

That is not a recipe for personal contentment, the happiness of children and family, or facing the ageing process with any kind of equanimity. Instead, it consigns women to a perpetual state of narcissistic turmoil. And so when I looked at Kate Middleton – now Catherine, Duchess of Cambridge – suddenly radiant with undisguised joy on the palace balcony, I wished for her the space to enjoy her youth, to age with grace, and above all else to keep reminding Britain what a woman looks like when she’s happy.